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Besides food and experiments, the Dragon cargo ship ordered up by NASA holds a new docking port, or parking place, for future commercial crew capsules. Liftoff is scheduled for 10:21 a.m. Sunday. Good flying weather is forecast for SpaceX's unmanned Falcon rocket. This shipment is especially critical because the space station has lost two deliveries since fall. A Russian supply ship spun out of control shortly after liftoff in April and burned up on re-entry with all its contents. In October, an Orbital Sciences Corp. cargo carrier was destroyed in a Virginia launch explosion. Once again, SpaceX is picking up...

Once again, SpaceX will try to recover a very expensive part of its rocket after launching it into space. If SpaceX succeeds in recovering the first stage of its rocket after its 10:21 a.m. ET launch on Sunday at Florida's Cape Canaveral, it will be a historical achievement. It will push space travel further toward a future in which people, satellites and other items can be inexpensively launched into orbit.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

The closer we get to Ceres, the more intriguing the distant dwarf planet becomes. New images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft provide more clues about its mysterious bright spots, and also reveal a pyramid-shaped peak towering over a relatively flat landscape. "The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common. These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly," said Carol...

The latest images of Ceres taken by the Dawn spacecraft have captured a fascinating pyramid-shaped mountain on the surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, more and more features are beginning to reveal themselves. This includes the mysterious bright spots, which appear now as an array of dots scattered across the floor of a crater - but their source remains unknown. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3134836/Pyramid-spotted-Ceres-Mysterious-lone-mountain-discovered-towering-surface-dwarf-planet.html#ixzz3dr9nxnHS Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook The latest images of Ceres taken by the Dawn spacecraft have captured a fascinating pyramid-shaped mountain on the surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, more and more features...

Illustration Of A Planetoid Crashing Into Earth In 2013, a 60-foot-wide meteor exploded over Russia, and no one saw it coming. The Chelyabinsk impactor was relatively small by interplanetary standards, but the blast injured about 1,500 people and damaged 7,000 buildings. If a larger rock were headed for Earth, how would we defend ourselves? The short answer is, scientists aren’t really sure, but one solution sounds a lot like the plot from a 1998 Michael Bay movie: just nuke ‘em. In hopes of averting a space rock calamity, The New York Times reports that NASA has just sealed a deal...

Russia's investigative committee spokesman has demanded that an international investigation be launched into the US 1969 moon landings, after a US-led investigation into the world governing body Fifa, cast doubt over the fairness of choosing Russia to host the next World Cup. Nine Fifa officials were implicated in a US and Swiss investigation into the alleged corruption, with the scandal eventually leading to the organisation's president Sepp Blatter to announce his resignation. Russia and Qatar have both denied that their hosting rights are linked to any wrongdoing, however about a fortnight ago the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed...

Extra-terrestrial life does exist, the head of NASA has confirmed, but said aliens were not hidden in Area 51. NASA Administrator Major Charles Bolden told British schoolchildren that he was confident that scientists would find life outside of Earth because there were so many planets that are similar to our own. Asked by 10-year-old Carmen Dearing if he believed in aliens, he said: "I do believe that we will someday find other forms of life or a form of life, if not in our solar system then in some of the other solar systems - the billions of solar systems...

Gizmodo, as part of a series of stories about space, ran a piece on Thursday called ‘What is Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, it’s not Tech.” The article attempts to examine some of the political impediments that have stymied the settlement of the high frontier. Unfortunately, the piece would have been more convincing had it not been for one rather glaring error. The piece suggested that the United States attempted to claim the moon as sovereign territory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. “So much of...

It may sound like a science fiction movie, but in a small conference room at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a tight-knit group of top NASA scientists is coming up with new ways to protect our planet from killer asteroids. The idea is to repurpose and build on technologies being developed for other space missions. How big is the threat from asteroids? Well, Jason Kessler, NASA's director of the Grand Challenge, says that as of Wednesday morning asteroid hunters around the world have identified and are tracking 12,706 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) -- or asteroids - that could come close...

At long last NASA is heading back to Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa and doing so in a big way – because scientists believe it harbors an alien ocean of water beneath an icy crust and therefore is “one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for signs of present-day life” beyond Earth. Top NASA officials have now formally and officially green lighted the Europa ocean world robotic mission and given it the “GO” to move from early conceptual studies into development of the interplanetary spacecraft and mission hardware, to search for the chemical constituents of life....

Drought-stricken California is not the only place draining underground aquifers in the hunt for fresh water. It’s happening across the world, according to two new studies by U.S. researchers released Tuesday. Twenty-one of the world’s 37 largest aquifers – in locations from India and China to the United States and France -- have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water is being removed than replaced from these vital underground reservoirs. Thirteen of 37 aquifers fell at rates that put them into the most troubled category. “The situation is quite critical,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet...

It wasn’t the Martians’ fault their planet died. If they existed – once – Martians were likely microbes, living in a world much like our own, warmed by an atmosphere and crisscrossed by waterways. But Mars began to lose that atmosphere, perhaps because its gravity wasn’t strong enough to hold onto it after an asteroid impact, or perhaps it was gradually blown away by solar winds. The cause is still mysterious, but the ending is clear: Mars’s liquid water dried up or froze into ice caps, leaving life without its most precious resource. Any Martians would have been victims of...

National Space Society Opposes Senate Gutting of Commercial Crew Program [and investing in Russian economy] The National Space Society (NSS) strongly opposes the Senate Appropriations Committee’s $344 million (27%) cut of the 2015 Commercial Crew budget requested by the Administration. The Senate cuts were $100 million more than those recently passed by the House. NSS stands with NASA administrator Charles Bolden when he said “By gutting this program and turning our backs on U.S. industry, NASA will be forced to continue to rely on Russia to get its astronauts into space – and to continue to invest hundreds of millions...

European scientists are celebrating after receiving a remarkable communication from space. The solar-powered Philae comet probe is sending signals back to earth after seven months of silence. The Philae spacecraft has been in touch with Earth from a speeding comet for the second time since waking up a few days ago, mission control said Monday, and scientists hope to improve communications with the lander by shifting the trajectory of its mother ship. Philae in November became the first spacecraft ever to settle on a comet when it touched down on icy 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but it managed to send data to Earth...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz supports NASA's human space exploration program as a national priority that deserves congressional support. USA Today reports if NASA's program goes as planned, astronauts could travel to Mars by the 2030s. Cruz, a Tea Party Republican, said developing a rocket and capsule that could cost tens of billions of dollars is "critical" to ensuring American's leadership in space. "It is imperative that America has the capability to get to the space station without the assistance of the Russians," Cruz said Tuesday while chairing a hearing before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness. "The Commercial...

Those of us in the media aren’t necessarily well known for having the longest attention span. By our very nature, we may be captivated by a story one week and then suddenly find ourselves unable to recall its most basic details when a new, juicy headline comes along. This may be how the game is played in Washington, but it’s frustrating, especially when you remember a moment of panic that everybody else seems to move on from. In 2006, that concern was over port security and was centered on President George W. Bush approving a deal with Dubai Ports World...

SEATTLE, Feb. 22, 2005 -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] today said development of the 747 Large Cargo Freighter is proceeding according to plan and the modified freighters will be ready to support final assembly of the first Boeing 787 Dreamliners in 2007. "We have a top-notch team of engineers working to design what will be one of the most unique airplanes flying," said 787 Vice President of Manufacturing and Quality Scott Strode. "This kind of modification is an engineer's dream. It's an extremely challenging project, and it's essential to the success of the Dreamliner." Boeing announced last week the critical "swing...

It seems like Mars has just about everything: auroras, water, and now... glass? In a paper published recently in Geology researchers announced that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) found deposits of glass in craters on the Martian surface. These are the first deposits ever found on Mars, and they could help us figure out if there was ever life on the red planet. On Mars, the glass was created when meteorites slammed into the Martian surface with enough force to melt some of the rocks, which then cooled quickly enough in the atmosphere, turning them into a type of glass...